Be wary of intimidation at the polls

Wednesday

Sep 12, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Clive McFarlane

Last Thursday, during the primary election, many in Worcester witnessed the shenanigans by some to intimidate voters.

This shameful behavior escalated at Monday night’s Election Commission meeting when City Clerk David Rushford, who was called several times to settle disputes at one heavily-minority community polling station, was accused by one of his own poll workers as being the one who was intimidating people.

Now, a city-paid poll worker throwing such an accusation at the city clerk might seem strange and alarming, but it only reflects how insidious an organized attempt to plant fear and confrontation in the polling booth has become.

The attempt by right-wing, tea party affiliated groups around the country to suppress the vote in the upcoming November election has been broadly reported.

One of these groups, True the Vote, an offshoot of a Texas tea party organization, has pledged to recruit a million poll observers to work the polls in November.

Bill Ouren, national coordinator for the group, reportedly has told his volunteers that they need to make voters feel “like driving and seeing the police behind you.”

But we need not look to Texas to find such blatant attacks against minority voting rights.

In April, with Sen. Scott Brown and about 200 people in attendance, a group calling itself “Activate Worcester,” unveiled itself in a ceremony at Carrington Hall here in Worcester.

On the surface, the group appeared to be just another political action committee seeking to energize Republicans and independents. Founded by Bonnie Johnson, an elected Republican State Committee member and the regional director for Mr. Brown’s “Women for Brown” coalition, the group pledged to do all it could to increase voter participation.

“If people simply cannot get to their assigned polling place, they should be taking full advantage of the absentee ballots that are readily available, giving voice to all who choose to vote,” Ms. Johnson was quoted as saying at the time.

Perhaps energizing voters was too tall a reach for the group, because now it appears it has taken the voter-suppression route.

In training poll workers and poll observers this summer, Ms. Johnson noted on an Activate Worcester webpage that the reasons for her outreach was because Worcester had recently registered at least 3,000 new voters who were welfare recipients and that a local community group was pushing to elect two extreme-left candidates.

The group has also moved to de-legitimize the city’s Election Commission by providing its own poll-worker training sessions and by infiltrating the city-paid poll worker staff.

Although the city trains its poll workers every year, several of these poll workers chose this year to also undergo poll training given by Activate Worcester.

Mr. Rushford said he has told these Activate Worcester-trained workers that if they weren’t going to follow the city’s guidelines, they should not take the job.

Mayor Joe Petty and other city councilors made it quite clear Monday that they will not allow Worcester residents to be intimidated at the polls.

“No way under my watch this is going to happen,” Mr. Petty said.

However, it was still alarming to hear Donna Winant, a poll warden who has worked for the city for years, promoting her preference for voter ID at the polls during Monday’s meeting.

One only hopes she doesn’t put her preference into practice when she works the polls in November.

In any case, this tells me that the city will need to clean up its own house as a first step in fighting voter suppression.